‘Hey! HEY!’ followed the shaken voice of Kate. ‘What’s wrong with you? Release Viv immediately!’
Despite being unable to see, the Seeress turned in Kate’s direction. The look she gave her was like seeing something dirty on the sole of her shoe.
‘Human child, you do not understand,’ said Blind Irra.
‘Explain then,’ called Kate. ‘Explain what you want with Vivian!’
‘The creature you call Vivian is not who you think she is,’ said the old woman, dislike written in every line of her face.
‘Excuse me? Of course she— I’ve known her for ages. Who else would she be?’
‘She was born Sunya to her majesty Queen Alaria, and her consort, his liege Vishnu—’ Blind Irra began to say, but Lucian interrupted her.
‘Codswallop. Vivian’s name is in Ala Spuria’s name registry. Seen it myself.’
‘And who was she before she was Vivian, boy?’
Kate quickly turned to Lucian and whispered, ‘I know for fact Viv named herself.’
‘The Pattern cannot lie, for I am blind to everything but Threads. She is not of your world. She is of ours .’
Spread-eagled onto the grass, Vivian had momentarily stopped struggling and was listening intently. Kate blinked slowly, as though afraid of missing something.
‘But— what you’re saying is outrageous. Viv can’t have come from here.’
‘And yet she did,’ said Blind Irra. ‘Vivian and Sunya share a Thread. Sunya sought refuge in Existence, on your world, to escape the justice of our people. Upon crossing the Shroud between this reality and the next, Sunya lost all memory of herself and fashioned herself a new identity. Her Thread has been missing from the loom… until today.’
For a full moment, Lucian and Kate looked like they couldn’t believe their ears. Acciper’s expression betrayed mingled curiosity and anger.
‘You said Viv fled your world to escape the justice of your people. Why?’ said Lucian entrancedly, detecting the approach of a very good story.
‘Sunya was born with a dangerous power,’ said Blind Irra, facing the hole in the Pattern. ‘Sunya manifested all that she called to mind, be it thoughts, or dreams, or fears. A mere child at the time, something about her unsettled the loom. Her Thread was a dark one, invisible at times and unlike anything any of us had woven. It took the Guild ages to understand Sunya’s strong will could change things that weren’t meant to be changed. Bend odds, if you may, or summon Prospects when none were due.’
Vivian wished she hadn’t changed out of her Artisan clothes. The metal wires were beginning to cut into her skin. Irra’s foggy eyes unfocusedly gazed at the Pattern.
‘The Guild knew such powers could only come from Chaos. While all Weavers are strong in Kaalà, the force of all creation, Sunya seemed to be equally strong in its complete opposite, the Æbekanta. It was clear to us Sunya was a born Weaver, but unlike most of us, she needed no loom to twist reality. Every time she wove, she created two distinct Truths living in contradiction; two realities, closely entangled into one. Before long, her actions had triggered an anomaly in the Pattern of Threads – a hole no Weaver could seal.’
With every pair of eye on her, Blind Irra slowly paced the clearing.
‘Of course, high born as she was, Unwiring her Thread from the Pattern was no gentle option. One cannot doom the Queen’s heir without dooming the Queendom. Instead, the princess was confined to Palas Lumina, put under lock and key at its highest tower and bound to await further instructions. The Guild forbade her to interact with anyone, afraid of the ripples such actions would cause. We placed guards at Sunya’s door, whilst the royal family did their best to make her feel at home. A way was bound to come up.’
A few feet away, Lucian was trying to make sense of it all, his face screwed up in painful concentration. The clearing was now as still as a grave, save for the Seeress, whose voice continued to boom through like a firing cannon.
‘Before we could figure a way to heal her, Sunya was gone,’ Blind Irra said gravely. ‘She escaped the tower, found a way to the Pattern of Threads and stepped through the very hole she had caused.’
A pressing silence descended upon the clearing. Kate quickly looked at Vivian, who was face down in the grass, fumbling with the metallic Threads.
‘That night we lost her, and she became the Missing Thread, never to emerge again. Her fleeing caused the rip in the fabric of reality to briefly reseal – another one of her realities, no doubt – only to be reopened again when one of our Weavers… slipped in her duties.’
The old woman pointed at the gaping hole currently consuming the loom of Threads.
‘The hole in reality is a threat to all that is, and must be resealed. I’m sorry, human girl, but Sunya should have died a long time ago. Into vavera . It is woven.‘
‘The hell it is!’ hissed Kate through gritted teeth. She took a step forwards, her fists clenched. ‘All this crazy talk about woven realities just to justify downright murder! Vivian was right. Coming here was a mistake!’
Another step and Kate fell nose down in the grass next to Vivian, her mouth silenced, her body bound in metallic Threads. A few feet away, Lucian, who had neither moved nor objected, found himself tied up as well, and silenced on principle.
The clearing was quickly filled with cries of protest. Intimidated by the speed of Irra’s decisions, most Weavers raised their fists in protest, whilst a few others seemed to agree with an Unwiring. Acciper looked like he was about to kill someone.
‘Orange Cloaks, don’t rush this!’ he told the murmuring crowd. ‘Didn’t bring the princess here for slaughter. Brought her because advancements have been made in containing Chaos. She’s not first nor last born to a dangerous Thread. She cannot be first to die from it. Sunya needs help, not an Unwiring.’
Irra Lazuli turned her foggy eyes in Acciper’s direction.
‘We are not a cruel people—’
‘About to become one, though,’ scowled Acciper, his fingers over the pommel of his sword, ‘cutting her from the Pattern.’
‘Do not think I take this decision likely,’ the Seeress retorted. ‘When it is time to kill an innocent, we flinch and we falter and cry and curse the gods, but we do it. By my Thread, we do it so that the rest of us may live.’
‘She just a child,’ said Acciper pleadingly. ‘A child ! And here stand mighty Weavers, supreme cosmic beings, fair guardians of reality, trembling before her. Acting hasty, acting fearful.’
‘Sure we fear. Sure we make haste,’ said Blind Irra. ‘Time is of the essence, boy. Take you and your bird. By cosmic laws, you exist no more, but here you stand. This… child, as you call her. Do you not see how she defies the odds? How she substitutes her will for ours? The longer we wait, the more she’ll change things. We cannot let more Chaos creep into our loom.’
Acciper lowered his head. A few Weavers behind them cheered.
‘We are Weavers,’ said Blind Irra in a mixture of pride and defiance, and several Weavers in the background muttered their approval. ‘We do not judge by one’s actions. We judge one’s Thread. We magistrate one’s nature, purpose and being. We measure one’s weight and relevance in the great loom of things, and we say that the weaving of odds is a doorway to Chaos.’
The crowds cheered even louder.
‘You will murder an innocent!’
‘No Thread is innocent if it affects the loom,’ said Irra coldly.
‘You will murder a queensblood without the Queen’s permission!’ said Acciper. ‘Your Guild will commit regicide. No respect for the Queendom, have you? Alaria must be here.’
‘Your opinion is of no weight to us, boy,’ said the Elder Seeress. ‘You’re outside the Guild and dead to the Pattern. Sunya is a traitress and a thief, and you exist on precious time she stole for you. We will deal with your case soon.’
Acciper’s thick eyebrows w
ere narrowed to a V-shape. Blind Irra turned to the hundreds of frightened faces.
‘My brothers and sisters, ours is the Weave,’ she said. ‘Ours is every decision. The cosmos has given us a glorious second chance. Let us not waste it. The Weaver of Terrible Odds must die. Who among you agrees?’
Irra Lazuli’s words were met with yet more approval from the Weavers. Vivian pushed her head against the grass, desperate to grasp what was going on. Against the blinding lights of the Pattern, a sea of orange robes had moved to the front and raised their long-sleeved hands. The Weavers were voting, and Vivian was petrified to see that more than half had raised their hand in favour of her death. Her tied-up fingers inched towards the knife at her hip.
The Elder Seeress gazed at the crowds, looking pleased.
‘The Unwirer… let him through.’
She signalled towards a tall figure in a dark cloak. The Orange Cloaks began to part and onward stepped a man whose hooded face was shrouded in flawless darkness. The ground cracked and sizzled under his feet, for wherever the Unwirer put his foot, the grass would wither and the earth would split. The apparition was holding what appeared to be a large, silver spindle with a single black Thread curled around its spool, and a sharp pin on the end.
Vivian lifted her head enough to find herself looking into a surface of darkness. Unlike any other Weaver, the Unwirer seemed to be made out of nothing but darkness, and where a face should have been stood a deep horrible gash, like a gaping hole with no observable bottom.
A sense of dread exploded within her, as every muscle in her body froze up before the towering horror. Before she knew it, Vivian was peering into the dark recess of the Unwirer’s hood, her eyes unmoving, her gaze feasted upon that bottomless darkness. A wonderful feeling of calm and rejoice took her, and her eyelids began to droop.
A brown-haired girl with eyes like emeralds was staring her down, her little hand in hers. Vivian sleepily smiled at her half-sister, a girl she had only known from photos. Darien and Aniya were there too, standing on either side of Mira Amberville, laughing out loud, tears of happiness strolling down their rosy cheeks. It was happiness at its most profound. Vivian joined them in laughter, a glazed grin on her face, her coal-black eyes rolling into the back of her head.
And then she heard it, a sharp, piercing voice. Acciper was screaming at the top of his voice.
‘VIVIAN, DON’T LOOK! DON’T LOOK UNDER HIS HOOD!’
She heard a second scream, this one of a higher pitch than the first, and Kate’s screams of terror filled her like water, like fire. Before she knew it, Vivian’s fingers had enclosed around the cold handle of her knife and felt the familiar surge of orange energy enter her arm and kindle the veins beneath the surface of her skin.
The Unwirer stepped back. A Weaver was thrown a few feet backwards; another was clutching at a large gash that appeared in his arm as if by magic.
‘Someone stop her!’ Blind Irra’s voice came from somewhere across the clearing.
Scores of Weavers cornered her only to be flung backwards by an unseen slingshot, and Vivian finally understood why Æbe’trax had been forbidden throughout an entire world. Ashlar had been right to call it, “thought made flesh”. With minimum effort, she could materialize her every thought into immediate actions. If she wanted the Weavers to keep away, the knife would thrust them away with the force of an anvil.
‘Stop her! Stop her!’
But the Weavers were obviously no warriors and after a while, they pulled back, a mixture of awe and alarm in their eyes. Putting one foot behind the other, Vivian edged away from the Orange Cloaks, towards the gaping hole at the heart of the Pattern.
‘I remember it... My mother’s face, I remember it. Queen Alaria…’
Anxiety was smothering all breath out of her.
‘S-she… Alaria was good to me,’ she swallowed, ‘b-but she listened to you lot, listened to the Guild, and stowed me away in t-that cage. That tower—’
Vivian drew back, putting one foot behind the other, until her back collided with the Pattern of Threads. The metallic loom was generating so much heat it burned right through her silky attire. She winced, but didn’t pull away. Her plan was to jump through the hole in the Pattern and disappear from this world, as she had seen herself do before. The hole, however, was smaller than she remembered.
‘What’s happening to the loom?’
A great murmur of fear mingled with awe filled out the clearing from inside out. The Orange Cloaks were all pointing as one man at the large hole in the Pattern, which seemed to be shrinking at a rapid pace. The air continued to sizzle and pop, as Vivian drew closer and closer to the void, and with every step she took towards it, the smaller it became, until the hole was no larger than a cartwheel. It was, however, not willing to close completely.
‘Brothers and Sisters, there’s your proof! That’s Æbekanta incarnate!’ roared the Elder Seeress. ‘She is Chaos itself, for only Chaos can fight Chaos. Once again, the Unwirer failed to unwire her Thread. The Great Void draws from her and she draws from it, filling each other up with more emptiness and more nothing!’
Panting and coughing, Vivian pointed a knife like an angry supernova at Irra Lazuli’s blind old face.
‘You!’ she snuffled, her knife hand shaking like a leaf in the wind. ‘You speak of filling voids? You, who put the void in me? You, who took me away from everything I held dear and true? Yes Irra, I remember you now. I remember it was your order to let me rot in that tower. For six years, you fed me through a gap in the door, hoping – no doubt – that I would starve so your— your—’ she pointed the knife at the Unwirer ‘—your executioner won’t need to pull a spindle on me.’
Vivian stepped away from the loom and as she did, the hole in the Pattern grew larger. There was a cold, menacing wind coming from the ever-growing hole in the loom, but Vivian didn’t care. She did it once, she could do it again.
‘I didn’t deserve that hole you put me in. I wanted to be free,’ she muttered, taking another step back, her knife still pointing from one Weaver to another. ‘I was a clueless child. A person.’
‘A person guilty—‘ Blind Irra begun when something cut her across the cheek. Vivian strengthened her grip, the knife in her hand glowing like liquid fire.
‘—guilty of nothing but being born in the wrong place, to the wrong family!’
Ruby-red blood trickled down Irra Lazuli’s wrinkly cheek.
‘Sunya—’
‘ Vivian . By right and by choice, Vivian . But to you, I’m not a person. To you, I’m just one empty void; a dark abyss that so conveniently voices your deepest fears. You accuse me of single-handedly dooming the Pattern, but it was your kind who built it. You say my Thread stands out from the rest, and for that you seek to break me’ her little hand gripped the handle of the knife even tighter, driving it to glow brighter. ‘Tougher folk than you have tried to break me, and still I bend, and twist and never break!’
‘Sunya, you don’t see—’
‘Do you see, Blind Irra?’ Vivian roared, her coal-black eyes reflecting the orange inferno in her hand. ‘Do you see me ? Do your hear me ? Or is your Sight of the future clouding your present? I am Vivian Amberville!’
‘Very well then, Vivian Amberville,’ repeated the Seeress, quickly wiping her bloody cheek on her sleeve. ‘Put down the Æbe’trax. You don’t want to hurt anyone, do you?’
‘You’ve no clue what I flipping want!’ said Vivian, her hands still trembling on the knife. ‘I would do it. I would hurt you— just enough to turn you into me!’
The Elder Seeress turned her head. ‘Sunya’s lost all sense. Shoot her down, Sparrowhawk.’
Acciper didn’t move.
‘Did you not hear me, forge-boy? Grab that accursed bow and put an arrow between her eyebrows.’
Acciper stepped between the old woman and Vivian.
&nbs
p; ‘Not gonna happen.’
‘You’re disobeying my order?’
‘Don’t take orders from you, Seeress. Not your boy, either.’
Vivian’s gaze turned to him. ‘Acciper. Acciper Sparrowhawk !’
‘Your Grace,’ said Acciper, his back bending into a low bow. ‘You used to call me that… a long time ago.’
‘I... I remember now. You— you didn’t know your own name, so... so I made one up. Everyone needs a name.’
‘Very true, Your Grace.’
‘Vivian... call me Vivian ,’ she insisted, the glowing knife still in her fist. ‘I always thought Acciper Sparrowhawk was a funny name. Funny and clever. We were kids, though. Never expected you to keep that nickname.’
‘I did,’ said Acciper. ‘Been using that name since.’
‘A loyal friend then, a loyal friend now. “Ace”, I used to call you. Ace the Wild.’
‘Had a feeling it might be you, Vivian,’ said Acciper, his hazel eyes agleam. ‘Suspected it when I heard you speak Avis’aan – language of your own invention. You taught me how to call them to me. Swans and Mirrs, red sparrows and great hawks—’
‘—enough!’ Irra Lazuli’s tall voice poured over the clearing. ‘Every wasted moment is costing us Threads. Vivian has plainly refused to subject herself to the will of the Guild. Brothers and sisters, ours is the Weave. Draw out your knives and slay her where she stands!’
‘Who’s shouting commands in my stead?’
A young woman had entered the clearing, saddled on a silver-gray Pelsinn Mount whose reigns were encrusted with gleaming gemstones. Behind her rode a rosy-cheeked, plump woman in a white bonnet. Vivian quickly recognized princess Daimey’s beautiful long-hair and eyes like dancing fireflies.
‘ Slay her where she stands ? Blind Irra, last time I checked, no one but the Queen can call for an execution,’ said Daimey, her beautiful face disfigured by anger. ‘What is the meaning of this?’
Her face now turned to Vivian Amberville, who was still standing next to the hole in the Pattern with her Æbe’trax knife pointing at the others.
Vivian Amberville - The Weaver of Odds Page 23
